Once the mother was finished with her food, I even found myself sitting down with them and allowing them all to climb into my lap for a nap.
It was completely unlike me, and I tried to picture what I looked like right now from the outside, wondering at this strange behavior. Then, I remembered that I might very well be the only human being left on this planet, and it started to make sense again.
After all, where was the hurry when you didn’t know if you were even going to find anyone else—and were really starting to doubt it?
I leaned my head back against the wall behind me, letting my mind dwell on that for a moment, and tried to come up with something that sounded like it might make a plan.
I was good at planning. Most of my life had been spent coming up with plans in one version or another. Hacking was like that. You found the target—the thing you wanted to break into—and you started planning how you were going to do it. You made one plan, then another, and then another, so that if the first one didn’t work and the second one also failed, you had something to fall back on. Because once you got in, you had no way back out again unless one of your plans worked.
Yeah, I’d spent years figuring out how to plan for any possible contingency. But right then, for the first time that I could remember, nothing was occurring to me. The world around me seemed to be completely devoid of human life, and though I’d never been particularly fond of most humans, now that they might all be gone…
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do without them.
Unable to get my brain to think any further, and exhausted from the long night of escaping from that bunker and then walking all the way back to town, I finally closed my eyes and fell asleep.
When I woke, the cats were gone. I felt a jarring sense of loss, of loneliness, but then decided that it was probably better that way. If they’d left on their own, maybe it meant they had somewhere to go. Maybe they had a home where they were either taken care of or knew how to take care of themselves.
Either way, them leaving me meant I didn’t have to deal with the guilt of having left them, and since my guilt was currently at full capacity, that was fine by me.
I got to my feet and stared into the mist, which was starting to clear now. Given the general effect of the light, which was much the same as it had been the last time I’d had my eyes open, I was estimating that I’d only been asleep for an hour or so.
Not that it mattered. I still didn’t have any place to go.
But sitting still was going to get me a whole lot of nothing. That was no answer. If I was walking, at least I was making progress toward something. After three steps, my brain started to actually kick into gear and begin providing me with ideas, and the first one was so obvious that I was shocked I hadn’t thought of it sooner.
I was in Ashland. The town where I lived. I had an apartment here, and that apartment was chock-full of not only electronics, but also food. And water. My clothes. Shampoo! It was home. How hadn’t I thought to head there before?
I might not find humanity there. But I could damn sure get on the internet and start doing some research.
I turned right at the next block and started walking more quickly now that I had a direction, my brain coming up with more ideas as I walked. Jeff had confiscated my phone when he'd kidnapped me, but I had an old phone at home, I was sure of it, and that meant I could start calling people. People in other cities—and even other continents—to see how far this attack had gone. Check in with friends. See if anyone was still out there, and what they knew about what had happened.
I might actually get some answers. Might actually get to hear another human voice.
I was smiling by the time I hit the main street again.
A second later, a boy went shooting into my line of sight about a hundred feet away from me. He wriggled through the chain link fence that blocked the alley there off, and sprinted away.
I stared after him, my mouth actually hanging open for several seconds before I figured out how to move again.
“Hey!” I screamed. “Wait! Who are you? Where are you going? I need to know what happened here!”
I was sprinting after the boy before I could even really think through the action, but I didn’t pause or falter once I did start thinking. There were people up here still. And they might know what had happened—and where to find more people. Even if they didn’t, we could band together and send out search parties. Maybe find a city nearby where the population was still alive.
I flew down the alley, the pack bouncing against my back as my shoulder skimmed the wall on one side of the opening. It was a wide-open alley, thank goodness, because it gave me a very good view of what the kid was doing on the other side of that fence. He hadn’t turned out of the narrow space yet, but was running full-force straight ahead.
He definitely looked like he knew exactly where he was going.
“Wait!” I shouted after him. “I just want to know what happened here! I’m not going to hurt you!”
He cast a glance over his shoulder, and I had time to see that his eyes were enormous and incredibly frightened before he took a sharp left turn and disappeared.
I marked the spot where he’d turned, hoping he didn’t turn again before I got there, and increased my speed. I had to find the end of this fence—or a hole I could fit through—so I could follow him.
By the time I stopped again, I was in what I would have called the distinctly shady part of town. I’d been following the boy for several blocks, and had managed to keep him in my sights most of the time, but I was not in good shape. I couldn’t seem to catch up. The fact that he was younger than me—and that I was not used to running and was carrying a ton of food and water—had made it impossible for me to increase my speed enough to actually catch him.
Then, he made a series of turns that I wasn’t quick enough to follow.
I came to a skidding stop in the middle of what had once been Ash Street and turned in a circle, trying desperately to figure out where he might have gone. Barring that, I looked for anything that appeared to have had recent human hands on it. Live human hands. A shelter, a grocery bag, a coat left behind, anything. If he had come to this area, surely that meant this was where I’d find humans. I stared deep into the shadows under the bridge—a common spot for the drug dealers, in this part of town, and what seemed to me to be a prime location for human settlement—but didn’t see anything.
Turning, I glanced from one side of the street to the other, taking in the old, run-down shops that inhabited this part of town and giving them life again in my mind. Would people have gone into them to seek shelter? Could they be in there right now, watching me?
If they were, could I trust them? Or would they immediately rob me, taking my food and shoes and leaving me behind to starve to death?
This hadn’t been an area I’d liked to come to when Ashland was… well, alive. Dark and shady, it had hosted the small version of an underbelly in the town. The drug dealers and small-time criminals. Anyone looking for trouble. Runaways who didn’t want to be found.
In short, it was the kind of place I’d hung out in when I was sixteen. Once I’d come back to Ashland and tried to turn respectable, I’d avoided these sorts of places like the plague. It hadn’t been laid out in my parole, but it had been an important aspect to making sure I stayed on the straight and narrow. So, I didn’t have any working knowledge of what was around here.
And even now, deserted as it was, there was a seediness to this neighborhood that made me nervous. I whirled around, certain that I’d felt eyes on my back, but there was no one behind me. Just the wide, blank window of a shop that had been closed for years. My reflection stared back at me, wide-eyed and frazzled, and I forced myself to take a breath and calm my hammering heart. This area was no different than any other area in the city. Deserted, for the most part. There was no one here to hurt me.
Hell, I was probably the only live human for many blocks.
&nb
sp; I needed to find the other live humans. I knew now that there was at least one, and I didn’t think that kid could have survived on his own. He had to have parents, at the very least. I needed to find them. That was all.
I turned and started walking, and the next thing I knew, I was seeing stars and falling to the ground, my legs numb and my head exploding.
Chapter 21
When I woke up, head pounding, I was surrounded by people I didn’t know. I panicked and scrambled backward, trying to remember what the hell had happened last—and why I had just woken up on a sidewalk with a pounding headache.
Once my rational thoughts came crashing back in, the memory came with it. I’d been rushing forward, a plan in mind, when something had hit me across the temple. Looking now at the baseball bat in one of the men’s hands, I was guessing that had been the weapon of choice. And now that I was thinking—and able to count—I realized that there weren’t actually enough people to properly surround me.
There were only four of them. And they were standing lined up in front of me. Which meant I had an opening to my back. I was about to take advantage of it, scooting rapidly backward and getting my feet under me, when I came up hard against a wall, and stopped, out of necessity.
Okay, well conversation it was, then.
“Who the hell are you and what are you doing hitting me with a baseball bat?” I asked angrily, putting a hand to my head and frowning at the dull pain there.
Then, another thought occurred to me.
“Wait, add more questions to that. Who the hell are you and how did you survive whatever it was that killed everyone else in this town? What happened here, do you know? Do you know if it affected the whole word? How many people are left alive in the town? Is there a settlement?”
The man with the bat let that arm relax and held out the other, to give me a hand up. I wasn’t keen on taking the hand of a man who had just clobbered me with a bat, but I was also so happy to see other live humans that I hesitated for only a moment before accepting the offered hand and coming to my feet.
A moment later, I started questioning that. These might be live humans, but they’d also attacked me. That didn’t seem like the action of people looking for help—or a teammate. That seemed like the action of someone who was out looking for trouble.
I should have known. Those sorts of people had been my friends, once. They were familiar. Easy to spot.
So I stared at them warily, knowing that I couldn’t afford to let my guard down. No matter how happy I was to see people. If there were still humans in this world, then that meant I had to go back to my real-world philosophy: Figure out whether someone is good or bad before you trust them with anything.
It had worked for me for a long time as a hacker. I figured it would work in this weird dystopian situation as well.
“We are sorry about the bat,” a woman to my right said. “It’s just that we don’t know who might be a friend and who might be… an enemy out here.”
I turned to her, confused, and looked her up and down. Short. Red-haired. An intelligent face, but also one that was a little bit too crafty, like a fox. She had the look of someone who was hiding something. And she was wearing camouflage pants and heavy boots, like she’d come from the military or something.
We didn’t have any military bases around Ashland.
“Enemies?” I asked, trying to remember how close the nearest military base was. Because camo and army boots weren’t the sort of outfit you wore for fun. They were the sort of thing you wore if you were in the military or if you were one of those people who took yourself way too seriously.
Like I said. Figure out whether someone is good or bad before you trust them with anything. And as far as I was concerned, wearing camo and military boots when you weren’t in the military made you a pretty shady character.
“We’re not the only people who survived,” Bat Guy said. “And not everyone who survived is willing to share ground. We’ve found that attacking first is the best way to make sure we aren’t attacked.”
I rubbed at the sore spot on my temple. There were about fifty things wrong with his logic, and going through them made my head hurt even more.
“Doesn’t seem like a very good way to make friends, honestly. And given the situation, I’d say making friends is pretty important.”
He gave me a narrow-eyed glare, like he was unhappy that I saw right through his story, and I glared right back. Whoever these people were, they weren’t impressing me with their cleverness. Even I knew that if you were faced with a situation where most of humanity had been killed, the best bet for survival was to band together with any other survivors and go forward together.
Not try to kill everyone else before you even asked them who they were or what side they might be on.
“Who are you people, anyhow?” I asked again.
The woman took over again, and I turned to her, glad to write off Bat Guy, who seemed like he wasn’t the most natural leader. Or the most intelligent communicator. I might not trust Camo Girl, but I definitely respected her intelligence more.
The others in their group, I wrote off completely. They weren’t talking to me yet, which made them unimportant for now. Later, once I knew what I was going to get from this group, I’d figure out whether I needed them for anything or not. For now, I just wanted information.
“We worked for a national company, all in the same department,” she said quickly. “We were lucky enough to be in a fairly protected building, so we didn’t get hit at first. We heard the attack happening on the radio, though, and knew we had to do something. Our group turned to our CEO—a close friend—and asked for help. He was one of those guys who had planned for this sort of thing and had an entire panic room, built right into his house. He volunteered the extra space, saying he didn’t want to be alone in there and that he’d be happy to have us. We high-tailed it to his house and got into that room just in time to survive the attack.”
Hm. Well, putting aside the fact that all of that sounded incredibly rehearsed—and weirdly convenient—there were some more basic problems with her story.
“How long did you stay in the room?” I asked. If they claimed to have come out earlier than last night, I would know right away that they were lying. I already didn’t feel like they were incredibly trustworthy, but if I could find definitive proof that they were lying…
I would what, I suddenly realized. What exactly was I going to do if they were lying? Run? Get out of there, like they would let me leave? Tell them thanks, but no thanks, I wasn’t interested in joining up with their little crew, after all?
That I had a better offer with someone else?
My brain finally caught up with the situation, and I had the presence of mind to look around at the rest of their little group. They were all armed, in one way or another, with bats and crowbars. True, I had a gun—I slid my hand around my back and felt for it, just to be sure—but I was also only one person against their four.
Even if I managed to shoot one or two of them, the others would be on me before I could get away.
Me and my gun were well and truly outnumbered. I didn’t know what they wanted with me, but something told me I needed to start planning as if I was a prisoner. Not an equal.
“Just came out this morning,” the woman answered. “He had enough supplies to last that long, and once they ran out, we figured we didn’t have any other choice.”
Interesting. Convenient timing, if that was the case, unless they’d somehow known about the VXM as well—and how long it took to break down.
I wasn’t naive enough to think I’d just randomly happened across people who were going to help me out of this situation and had managed to survive by dumb luck. There had to be more to this than they were telling me.
“Where is this CEO?” I asked, looking for another hole in their story.
“Back at the mansion,” Bat Guy said quickly, casting a meaningful—and creepy—look at the other members of his team. “He’s wai
ting for us there. We came out to see if we could find anyone else in this area. Anyone to add to our team.”
“Team?” I asked quickly.
A nod. “We figure we’ll have a better chance of surviving if we all band together, right?” he said. “We figure the more minds we have working on the problem, the better off we’ll be. There’s plenty of food and water in the mansion. Plenty of room. If we gather enough people, get enough brains working on it, maybe we can figure out a way out of this mess.”
Okay, well that worked along the same lines as what I’d been thinking earlier, and it definitely made sense. In any good dystopian situation, you teamed up with the other people you found and worked together to solve the problem. You particularly wanted people with weapons—check—and food and shelter. Check and check. Supposedly.
So why did this feel like such a set-up?
Maybe it was because they claimed to be searching for team members, but had also hit me in the head with a bat and then told me that their MO was to attack first and ask questions later. That part still didn’t hold any water with me, because it went directly against what Bat Guy had just told me. They wanted a team. They were collecting people. But they’d also come at me with a bat literally swinging.
One of these things is not like the other.
“That why you want me?” I asked. “To join your team? Help you figure out how to get out of this situation?”
Because if so, I wanted to add on, I don’t know the first thing about anything. Don’t know how to get out of this. Just arrived myself. Been out of town visiting relatives.
First of all, it was the truth. Second, I’d already decided that I didn’t want to be part of their team. Because they weren’t good people, and I couldn’t trust them. They were too twitchy. Too intentionally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 1 | The Fall Page 13
